Installation

texlive-core, the essential package, based on the medium upstream install scheme (all other packages are based on the upstream collections). The package includes pacman hooks to automate mktexlsr, fmtutil and updmap.[1]

Kpathsea provides the kpsewhich(1) command to lookup paths. When run with the -var argument it can also print the values of variables.

Kpathsea uses filename databases (ls-R) to speed up searches in system-wide texmf trees (configured with the TEXMFDBS variable). This means that when system-wide file trees are changed, mktexlsr(1) or texhash (a symlink) need to be run as root. Fortunately the texlive-core automates this with a pacman hook targeting all default system-wide texmf trees but /usr/local/share/texmf.[5] So as long as you install system-wide packages via pacman you should not need to run mktexlsr or texhash at all.

Important information

This article or section is out of date.

Reason: ConTeXt nowadays works out of the box. You just sometimes need to run mtxrun --generate.[6] (Discuss in Talk:TeX Live#)

The ConTeXt formats (for Mark II and IV) are not automatically generated upon installation. See the ConTeXT wiki for instructions on how to do this.

TeX Live (upstream) now provides a tool for incremental updates of CTAN packages. On that basis, we also plan to update our packages on a regular basis (we have written tools that almost automate that task).

The way to handle font mappings for updmap(1) was improved in September 2009, and installation should now be much more reliable than in the past. In the meantime, if you encounter error messages about unavailable map files, simply remove them by hand from the updmap.cfg file (ideally using updmap-sys --edit). You can also run updmap-sys --syncwithtrees to automatically comment out outdated map lines from the config file.

Tips and tricks

Changing default paper size

It is currently impossible to set the default page size, because the Arch package removes the tool necessary for this, see FS#59094.

Usually, you would run the texconfig command, which is also capable of changing other useful settings.

Making fonts available to Fontconfig

By default, the fonts that come with the various TeX Live packages are not automatically available to Fontconfig. If you want to use them with, say XeTeX or LibreOffice, the easiest approach is to make symlinks as follows:

Troubleshooting

Error with "formats not generated" upon update

See FS#16467. (Note that if you do not use the experimental engine LuaTeX, you can ignore this.) This situation typically occurs when the configuration files language.def and/or language.dat for hyphenation patterns contain references to files from earlier releases of texlive-core, in particular to the latest experimental hyphenation patterns for German, whose file name changes frequently. Currently they should point to dehyph{n,t}-x-2009-06-19.tex.

To solve this, you need to either remove these files: /etc/texmf/tex/generic/config/language.{def,dat}
or update them using the newest version under: /usr/share/texmf/tex/generic/config/language.{def,dat}
and then run